The present invention relates to medical imaging of the prostate, and more particularly, to fully automatic segmentation of the prostate in 3D magnetic resonance images.
Detection and delineation of the prostate in magnetic resonance (MR) and computed tomography (CT) images is an important problem in medical imaging analysis. For example, prostate cancer is often treated by radiation therapy where precise targeting of the prostate is important. The exposure of neighboring organs, such as the bladder or the rectum, to ionizing radiation should be reduced to an absolute minimum. For this purpose, accurate localization of the prostate by exact organ delineation is critical. In addition, prostate delineation in medical images can be used for MR spectroscopy analysis (MRSI) to obtain metabolic information about prostatic tissue. Further, recent imaging techniques such as MR perfusion may also benefit from automatic prostate delineation in order to compute and normalize model parameters such as blood flow within the segmented area. Fully automatic detection of the prostate may also be useful for automatic scan range planning of subsequent scans, for example, to automatically position saturation bands.
Manual delineation of the prostate in 3D MR data, sometimes in combination with 3D CT data, is a challenging and labor intensive task, even for expert radiologists. The manual delineation of the prostate is a time-consuming process, and there is significant inter- and intra-user variability among manual segmentations of the prostate. Accordingly, a method for fully automatically segmenting the prostate in MR volumes is desirable.